Cork Spring Poetry Festival

The week-end after this sees the first big poetry festival of the year, the Cork Spring Poetry Festival, 13- 16 February.

The website has full details of the programme which includes readings and workshops, book launches and readings by "Cork debutants".

The winner of the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, Judith Barrington, will receive the prize and read from a selection of her poems and the Emerging Poets Reading showcases five writers of talent who have yet to publish a full-length collection of poems, Kate Dempsey, Cal Doyle, Annemarie Ní Churreáin, Kerrie O'Brien, and Fiona Smith.

One of the nice things about these festivals is the opportunity to encounter poets one has not heard about before. Confirmed for Cork are Carolyn Forché, Tomaž Šalamun, Gwyneth Lewis, Eduardo C. Corral, Karen Solie, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski.

I have booked a place on the  Carolyn Forché workshop and am really looking forward to it. The Poetry Foundation says of her, "Born in Detroit, Michigan in 1950, poet, teacher and activist Carolyn Forché has witnessed, thought about, and put into poetry some of the most devastating events of twentieth-century world history."

In tribute to Dennis O’Driscoll who died recently, a new event has been added to the programme. On Friday, 15 February at 2.30pm a free public discussion, 'Dennis O'Driscoll Remembered', will be facilitated by Gerald Smyth, poet, journalist, with the participation of Peter Jay (Anvil Press) Joseph Woods (Poetry Ireland) and Patrick Cotter (Festival Director). Later that evening, after Martina Evans's reading (ticketed) at 8.30pm, a selection of Irish and international poets will read poems by O'Driscoll.